Dawn finds me crouched at the bow of the boat, scowling out at the salt-tinged morning; a grimace of raw determination etched on my sleep-deprivation worn face. My slitted eyes scrape the limits of the horizon with fatigued relentlessness, searching chopping waves and thin grey fog for signs of what the deep, churning Pacific holds in store for us. I am troubled.
"Shaggy! For the love of God, get down from there before you fall in and drown yourself! It's your turn to cook breakfast so get moving!" Having thus stolen another gram of dignity from me, our captain drops back below decks and the day is begun. Mmmmm, a sailing vacation. Sounds nice, doesn't it? Sunny days lounging on the deck, basking in the sun while cool beads of pristine pacific water hurl through the surging air to kiss our skin with affectionate pecks. Hot days of open seas and warm nights of boozy revelry in remote harbours. That's kind of what we were thinking when we signed up for a week long, live-aboard sailing course in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. We got nothing but air on that pitch. Nothing but air. The four of us storm into Victoria on a Friday night. Reece and Monica quickly disappear for a quite evening on their own, while Skip and I light out on a traditional vacation-opening bender in the odd little bars downtown. After a pleasant night of violent excess, Skip and I meet up with Reece and Monica and we head to Sydney harbour to begin our epic nautical adventure. Our boat, it turns out, is a 34-foot Bavarian yacht - an impressive amount of sailboat for landlubbers to suddenly be put in control of. In spite of its size however, Reece almost immediately bashes his head on the boom, while Skip suffers a series of highlight reel caliber cranial impacts with the cabin lights. Meanwhile, I am nearly knocked unconscious by the low door to the bathroom. The lack of headspace aboard the yacht has become apparent almost immediately, but somehow we all continue to suffer from daily impacts. Throughout the trip, frequent shrieks of "Jesus Christ," "for the love of God," and other, more violent, expletives erupt from our crew at regular intervals. Our wily instructor seems mysteriously immune. Almost immediately, a power struggle begins to evolve. A struggle between opposing forces as different as socialism and capitalism. A conflict between the desire of we, the crew, to drink and vacation, and our instructor's desire to teach us enough about sailing to prevent us from killing ourselves and taking a perfectly good, rented boat to the bottom with us. Both sides join the battle with a vengeance. Our instructor & Captain, Jorge, is a tightly compressed package of explosives. He flies up and down the length of the boat all day, making adjustments and shouting commands. We are in constant motion. No course is good enough for us; no trim of the sails is adequate. At no moment in time is the state of the boat satisfactory. All day long we shriek about our vessel, adjusting the wrong ropes, tightening things that we should be loosening, grabbing the wrong pulleys, striking our heads on things and generally proving that we haven't sailed before. Jorge is beside himself. "For the love of Christ!" He shrieks, as an incorrect line is released and our sails collapse into heaps of useless tarp. "No, no, mother of God, no!" He roars as the boat turns hard to port instead of starboard, and becomes immediately becalmed. Our days are a whirlwind of frantic activity. The ocean spins around us as sun-baked islands slip past in a chaotic rush of frenzied sailing. Jorge blurs through our day; a grinning, shouting, cursing vision of ancient European sea captains. |
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